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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#311

Post by KorematsuFred »

victor106 wrote: post #58
dmor wrote: post #30

Wow, Looker last week and now Tableau. I’m only 90 days in to running the open source equivalent inside GitLab, and these big revenue multiples are telling a fascinating story. I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall for this negotiation, what a great outcome for Tableau shareholders! With all that’s happening we’re definitely looking to pick up the pace, and would love to work with more contributors on the free ope…

Exactly what we’ve been looking for. An open source ETL tool. This looks great. Will check it out for sure. Keep up the great work. I wonder if there are any other open source tools in this space?

I too need an open source ETL tool where I could programmatic specify the object mappings and it should work.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#312

Post by scomp »

kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

big expensive Oracle-ish databases

Don't forget Teradata.

I found the same thing with MicroStrategy. I spent a lot of time reverse engineering what I could from MicroStrategy jars to expose additional functions in their plugin interface (which is so incomplete it shouldn't be advertised). But the reality is its 20+ year old system with front end updates, can only put so many band aids on it.

I think the only thing keeping MicroStategy alive is its cube functionality and the businesses who have invested to much into it.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#313

Post by michaelmarkell »

danielscrubs wrote: post #135
Gpetrium wrote: post #64

If we look at Gartner's Analytics & BI magic quadrant from Feb 2019 ( https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/B0DCF50C816448EEAC8981B02387... ) it becomes clear that Tableau(Salesforce) & PowerBI(Microsoft) are the driving force in the area. The move to buy Tableau likely comes from an interest in enhancing cross-compatibility between Salesforce+Tableau, the ability to provide a more robust service offering that can compete…

I’ve used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don’t know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I’ve worked with a lot of BI people. I’m convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!

PowerBI is working hard to accommodate developers - for instance, we now have the ability to create custom python visualizations (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizatio...)

Disclaimer: I work for PowerBI

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#314

Post by manigandham »

smrtinsert wrote: post #240
kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

When I look at Jupyter notebooks, I ask myself why is anyone bother with ootb reporting tools or growing their own? Jupyter notebooks are the right mix of customizable and self-documenting.

How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks? Meanwhile, someone with basic computing experience can create in-depth reports with Tableau in less than an hour.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#315

Post by dragonwriter »

manigandham wrote: post #314
smrtinsert wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look at Jupyter notebooks, I ask myself why is anyone bother with ootb reporting tools or growing their own? Jupyter notebooks are the right mix of customizable and self-documenting.

How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks? Meanwhile, someone with basic computing experience can create in-depth reports with Tableau in less than an hour.

> How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks?

None, because it's too much programming for IT to let business people have access to it, and it's not disguised as an office productivity app the way Excel is.

If they had access to it and had basic training on it that anyone already competent in any vaguely quantitative domain could handle, plenty of them could and would.

At least judging by my experience with SQL shells and similar told that are both less powerful and less friendly than Jupyter + Python, and yet plenty of business people used them productively in enterprise environments (often right up until IT ripped it from their hands.)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#316

Post by manigandham »

therein wrote: post #283
oarabbus_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get…

Out of genuine interest and perhaps even a need for such a solution, is there anything that does what Metabase/Superset/Dash/GDS/ModeAnalytics does but for realtime datastreams? For instance, parsing and recording and visualizing the events coming from a websockets or some event queue/bus?

Those all work for that already, because they're just frontends to whatever backend system you're using. You a database like BigQuery with real-time streaming inserts and rerun your queries for results.

If you want analytics directly on the stream, then there are plugins available to support reading the query results of something like Kinesis Analytics or Confluent's KSQL.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#317

Post by manigandham »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #256
oarabbus_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get…

How does Tableau make your reporting more reliable? My understanding is that Tableau can hook into different data sources -- like your warehouse and SalesForce, for example. Then you can write some kind of SQL to generate charts. The auto-chart generation is nice. But what about Tableau makes it more likely to be accurate? Aren't you just as likely to make an error on the SQL in Tableau than if you didn't use Tableau…

Tableau is a GUI first. It's not designed for SQL based access and barely supports it other than as a type of custom datasource.

Since people aren't typing code, it can be more accurate to use, and it provides visual results beyond just a table that can be useful in detecting anomalies in your data.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#318

Post by icelancer »

ineedasername wrote: post #189
prepend wrote: post #22

This seems really high for a company without earnings and a weird growth curve. Their ticker is cool and maybe sales force wants to be DATA on nasdaq. Otherwise, it will be hard to justify this high markup for a tool company. It will be awesome if Salesforce can adjust their model and make Tableau spit out D3. Their desktop tool is nice for designing, but their server components seem frequently unnecessary for runnin…

>This seems really high Precisely what I thought. It looks like their annual revenue is ~ $1 billion, placing this price around 15x annual revenue. However, Looker has about $131 million in revenue, so their purchase price was an even higher 20x annual revenue. My conclusion is that these acquisitions are much less about sales revenue and much more about filling strategic holes in product offerings, and I can only as…

Multiplers don't scale linearly. The lower your valuation, the more possible it is to get a higher multiple for various reasons (cash, # of bidders in the market, etc).

At $1B/year in revenue there aren't a lot of companies that can realistically acquire you. At $131MM/year, there are.

But still I agree. Both are quite high.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#319

Post by manigandham »

kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

The backend has also evolved massively from Hbase to the cloud-powered data warehouses. We have the ability to ingest and query petabytes with single-second delays now. There's also on-demand querying like Presto/Drill/Dremio, ETL systems like CBT, and the growing space of "data lineage" for seeing how data is connected and has evolved over time.

The real issue has always been the organizational problems of larger teams and companies as data gets split into multiple silos and needs ETL and cleanup before it's useful. The new abilities we have gained have increased the complexity and scale which can lead to new challenges, but the tools are definitely getting better every day.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#320

Post by _AzMoo »

kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

There are loads of options for BI backends. Snowflake, Panoply, Redshift... the list goes on and on and on.
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